"Energy crisis cannot be solved by renewables, oil chiefs say"

It is clear to me that nuclear power is the only threat to the dominance of fossil carbon. One might suspect that the opposition to nuclear is funded by coal, oil, and gas companies.
Here is a typical specimen of the FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt-- fostered by opponents of nuclear power.
"Media knew 1.2×1012 Bq of plutonium was released in the first 100 hours."
A billion Bq, (becquerels) sounds frightening, but only ifyou you do not know how tiny a becquerel is.
At present, the actual annual US consumption of actual fissile uranium is about 50 tons, and probably 25 tons of plutonium derived from the non-fissile uranium.
Here are energy data for 2011 from EIA, and my commentary.
That figure also applies to the genuine waste, the fission products, produced,
But the energy crisis could be solved by adopting a nuclear power option which renews the supply of fissile nuclides.
Two such options exist, one of them proven.
See

NRDC Reports 2008 Of major electric power sources, nuclear is cleanest by far.From EIA data.

Here's how I think we could solve the energy crisis, modestly called "My Solution"

Rod Adams, of the website Atomic Insights says:
There is no longer any doubt in my mind that much of the power and temporary success of the antinuclear industry has been enabled by injections of resources (both financial and political) from people with strong interest in keeping human society addicted to hydrocarbon heat.
and I am inclined to agree with him.
Sierra Club has been exposed regarding its promotion of natural gas. Huge donations from the natural gas industry appear to concentrate the environmentalist mind wonderfully.http://e360.yale.edu/digest/sierra_club_accepted_millions_from_natural_gas_industry_report_says/3316/

New Stuff on Wind Turbines

Weird stuff from The Scotsman newspaperA 2.5 mile wide island in the Hebrides receives a grant to build six wind turbines to supply ten families, 38 individuals, with electricity.
It is even said to give them 24 hour electricity -- from the wind?

Madder still
If this report is true, these ten families have satisfied their need for up to 10 kW each, round the clock, with wind turbines of combined capacity 30 kilowatts, and a 30 kW solar PV array. But why six so small turbines?
It may be false. The picture accompanying it is NOT of six wind turbines.

A study in 2004 by the California Energy Commission estimated that up to 4,720 birds from 40 different species are killed each year at the Altamont Pass wind farm, including as many as 1,300 protected raptors.

and they need spinning reserve (usually gas turbines) for when the wind drops.

It Is Time for a National Nuclear Power Plan

For a given amount of energy produced, coal waste has more radioactive matter than nuclear waste,

Yet the radioactivity of coal waste is nowhere near as dangerous as the solid chemical waste,

Which in turn is nowhere near as dangerous as the gaseous emissions.

Are you starting to get the picture yet?

We have got to shut down all the
coal fired power stations, the sooner the better.
They supply about half the USA's electrical energy consumption, about 250,000 megawatt-years of energy annually.A typical generator has a capacity of about 1000 MW, a.k.a. one gigawatt.

There is a known way to do this, politically unpopular because of its unnecessary association with the horrors of the Cold War, and the guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Part of the problem, of course, is the dismally low level of popular scientific understanding.

The key to the problem, and its solution, is the fact that compared with other technologies, per gigawatt-hour of energy produced, nuclear power plants use minuscule quantities of fuel, and create even smaller amounts of waste.
A gigawatt-hour is a million kilowatt-hours, which are the kwh on your electric bill.
A gigawatt-year is a gigawatt-hour multiplied by the number of hours in a whole year.

Nuclear Power Plants Survive Hurricanes

For example, when hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, the eye and eyewall devastated a swath 20 miles wide. The heat energy released around the eye was 5,000 times the combined heat and electrical power generation of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant over which the eye passed.
It should be noted that a hurricane is in fact a gigantic heat engine, at least as high as its highest cloud top, and with a base area as big as three medium sized eastern USA States.
Its energy input comes from the warm water of the ocean.
It converts that into the mechanical energy of unpredictable, ferociously damaging, winds, and electrical storms which at least provide the soil with fixed nitrogen.

But of course the hurricane's energy was unpredictable, unusable, and would have destroyed any wind machine in its path.

Turkey Point's two reactors report a "net capacity" of just under 1,400 MW, and share a 3,300 acre site (about five square miles) with two fossil fuel electric plants.
Their combined "capacity factor" for 2008 was 94%, meaning that they supplied just over 1.3 gigawatt-years of electrical energy in that year.
Interestingly enough, the hurricane did do minor damage to a smokestack of one of the fossil fuel plants.
Note that hurricanes accumulate solar energy for days, over a sea area comparable with several states.
Warm water provides water vapor, which contains far more energy than a comparable volume of dry air.
We may therefore note that a vast amount of wind and solar power was present in the hurricane, totally unusable to human industry.
Any wind farm in the path of Andrew would have had to be rebuilt.
This is where a great deal of the seemingly immense amount of solar power reaching the Earth is inaccessibly used up.

How Much Land Does It Take to be Solar-Renewable?

Enormous land masses are required to produce reasonable amounts of power from alternate energy sources. For a 1000 MW output, it will take 150 square miles for wind power, and 10 square miles for solar energy in the most favorable locations.

These figures are consistent with what I have gleaned from pro-solar websites.
They also say that

As for the biomass option, if all the trees in the United States were used for energy production on a renewable basis (i.e., trees would be growing at the same rate they were being harvested), their contribution could amount to only about 10% of our total energy needs.In actual fact, there are few instances in history of forests even being harvested at a renewable rate.

Shutting down the IFR program may also have been due to the view, widespread in the USA, that the world tends to follow America's example.
When we abandoned reprocessing and the deliberate manufacture of plutonium, the rest of the world did not.
It was a naîve idea, and also stupid because

To build a bomb, you need either a reactor dedicated to producing bomb grade plutonium, or you might as well get bomb grade uranium the way the Manhattan Project did, from natural refined uranium metal.

Extracting plutonium from power reactor spent fuel rods, including those that the IFR produces, does not give you bomb grade plutonium.

James Lovelock alludes to this kind of ignorance, in his book "The Vanishing Face of Gaia", when he contrasts nuclear power with the so-popular wind turbine fashion.
Here is an excerpt from that book.
Lovelock finds the popular "renewable technologies" hopelessly inadequate, as I do, and wind turbines particularly offensive.

Recycling Nuclear Waste

The authors recommend that nuclear fuel be consumed and reprocessed in fast neutron reactors, using metallic rather than ceramic fuel rods, and liquid metal coolant rather than water. This facilitates the recycling of the neutron capture products by on-site processing which does not make bomb-grade fissile material available, and the waste is entirely fission products, which are a thousand times more short-lived than plutonium 239.

Inadequacy of the Popular Renewables

These figures for solar, wind, and biofuels can be checked, if you have sufficient determination, using the various estimates by their promoters.
It is necessary to ignore imprecise nonsense about the number of "homes" that can be supplied.
Look at the area of the project, compute the expected megawatt-hours per year, and then look at the ability of the project to match its output to an actual demand.
Wind, in particular, is totally unable to be summoned for the purpose of meeting a sharp increase in demand.
When the windspeed drops by 5%, the power supplied by the wind drops more than 14%.
And if it's blowing hard when there's no demand, unless you're pumping water out of a polder in the Netherlands, it's useless.

For biomass in particular, the energy available, no matter what clever organic technology you devise, cannot exceed the energy that the organic biomass would supply if it were directly oxidized.
In actual fact, you cannot convert simple sugars to ethanol with better than 67% energy efficiency.
Yeast fermentation consumes one in three carbon atoms in the conversion.
That's why champagne is fizzy, and bread rises. The fizz is carbon dioxide.

If you are a conspiracy theorist, you might wonder if the left wing opposition to nuclear power is being funded clandestinely by the petroleum industry.
It is my opinion, and theirs, that coal and oil will never be replaced by wind, solar, and biofuels.
So the only threat to their profits comes from nuclear, and in my opinion it would need to be nationally owned, like the great hydro dams of the Columbia watershed.

The government of France, which has never had much coal or oil, committed France to nuclear power instead.
Not only does Électricité de France supply 75% of France's electric consumption from nuclear, it can afford to export electricity to Britain and Germany.
In Britain, a flourishing nationally owned electric generation system was "privatised" in the Thatcher regime, and what seem to have been perfectly adequate nuclear power plants when nationally owned, now seem to have become a liability to their private corporate owners.
Perhaps they deteriorated under private maintenance, or perhaps the regulated profit allowance upon the capital, which is the biggest part of the plant investment, makes it unattractive.
The company "British Energy" is now owned by and is part of Électricité de France. --Another sign that the Sun Has Set Upon the British Empire!

The thing is, solar power is so dilute that the best way to collect it is hydroelectricity, and it doesn't emit any carbon dioxide after you've built the dams and machinery.
But it's not entirely benign environmentally.
What on earth makes people think that wind turbines are environmentally harmless?Email to the skeptic

Nuclear Breeder Options

LMFBR- Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor

Fast neutrons create 239U -> 239Np -> 239Pu from 238U, the common isotope of uranium.
The coolant is liquid metal, e.g. sodium which melts at the boiling point of water.
The prime example of this was the IFR program, which was canceled as "unnecessary" by the Clinton administration in 1994.
It had already proven itself effective, and proof against meltdown. The closed fuel cycle makes it resistant to anything less than terrorists who already have nuclear weapons.

LFTR- Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor

In this case, the fuel itself is in solution, which has certain advantages.
It is claimed that even with thermal neutrons, it can consume ALL of its nuclear fuel, so the only wastes are the short-lived fission products.
See Kirk Sorenson on Thorium - pdf
The fissile material is expected to be 233U, but the two other fissile species can probably be used as starters.
The "fertile" material is 232Th, the common isotope of thorium. By neutron capture, it is turned into 233Pa which decays to 233U, a uranium isotope which like 235U and 239Pu is fissile.
The US government has neglected some otherwise promising examples of this option.

Any one of India, China, Russia, Japan, France, or the Czech republic may very well become the world leader in civilan nuclear energy. Let's hope it isn't Russia or China.
Maybe Iran is truly only hoping to develop civilian nuclear.
Civilian renewable nuclear energy could dominate the world the way oil does now, when the reserves are used up,